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Saturday, March 09, 2013

Gender Actually Makes a Difference

The gender of parents actually makes a difference

Doug Mainwaring, a homosexual, published a fascinating article yesterday at The Witherspoon Institute.
Titled ‘I'm Gay and I Oppose Same-Sex Marriage’, the article gives an inside look into the problems that arise when two homosexuals try to create a “family” for their children.

After sharing his journey, Mainwaring states the conclusion he reached: “Over several years, intellectual honesty led me to some unexpected conclusions: (1) Creating a family with another man is not completely equal to creating a family with a woman, and (2) denying children parents of both genders at home is an objective evil. Kids need and yearn for both.”

Though Mainwaring is not a Christian and identifies himself as gay, he intentionally got back together with his x-wife for the sake of the children.
Mainwaring gave an antidote which shows, from the inside of family life, why gender matters:

"Over the last couple of years, I’ve found our decision to rebuild our family ratified time after time. One day as I turned to climb the stairs I saw my sixteen-year-old son walk past his mom as she sat reading in the living room. As he did, he paused and stooped down to kiss her and give her a hug, and then continued on. With two dads in the house, this little moment of warmth and tenderness would never have occurred. My varsity-track-and-football-playing son and I can give each other a bear hug or a pat on the back, but the kiss thing is never going to happen. To be fully formed, children need to be free to generously receive from and express affection to parents of both genders. Genderless marriages deny this fullness.
"There are perhaps a hundred different things, small and large, that are negotiated between parents and kids every week. Moms and dads interact differently with their children. To give kids two moms or two dads is to withhold from them someone whom they desperately need and deserve in order to be whole and happy. It is to permanently etch 'deprivation' on their hearts."

Mainwaring's article is not written from a Christian perspective, and thus he writes that “Same-sex relationships are certainly very legitimate, rewarding pursuits, leading to happiness for many…” At the same time, he has to acknowledge from his own experience that “Two men or two women together is, in truth, nothing like a man and a woman creating a life and a family together… they are wholly different in experience and nature.”
This goes against the pervasive idea amongst the homosexual community that gender is irrelevant to family life. Listen to what Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse said in an article reflecting on her debate with Judith Stacey:

I crossed swords with Judith Stacey…at a debate at Bowling Green State a few years ago. I asked her point blank if she believed men and women were completely interchangeable as parents. In front of that very friendly audience, she said absolutely: the gender of parents doesn’t matter….
Treating same sex unions like marriage amounts to saying that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. It is a cointoss from a child’s point of view, whether they have two moms, two dads, or one of each.

This idea that gender can be expunged from family without making any material difference may sound good in theory, but in the actual practice of family life, it is nonsense at best, and abusive to children at worse. This is something that Mainwaring has realized with startling clarity. Thus, his article concludes:

Gay and lesbian activists, and more importantly, the progressives urging them on, seek to redefine marriage in order to achieve an ideological agenda that ultimately seeks to undefine families as nothing more than one of an array of equally desirable “social units,” and thus open the door to the increase of government’s role in our lives…. Marriage is not an elastic term. It is immutable. It offers the very best for children and society. We should not adulterate nor mutilate its definition, thereby denying its riches to current and future generations.